Hi folks,

General question here... I'm writing a program which reads a ton of source data, crunches the numbers, and outputs a few nice summary reports. The source data is a lot of individual records:

00001,Item1,Item2,Item3,Item4,Item5,...
00002,Item1,Item2,Item3,Item4,Item5,...
00003,Item1,Item2,Item3,Item4,Item5,...

Originally, I created an object called "Record," which stored each Item. But I ran into serious trouble when I realized there are literally *MILLIONS* of records. My machine simply doesn't have enough system memory to handle the load. So I need a completely new approach to this problem.

Someone mentioned to me that my program should learn about these records by creating a hash table on-the-fly. Okay, sounds great. So I read up about hash tables in general and C++'s map function in particular, but I don't see a direct way to use these to address my problem. A hash table/map function would seem great if you wanted to track large amount of data which seperates into two pieces of information (person's name and phone number, for example.) What do you do when you have ten, twenty, maybe more thirty pieces of information you need to track?

So I'm just generally asking... does anyone see a way to do what I'm trying to do? I'm just asking for some general brainstorming ideas...

Many thanks!